The story notes a circle of Christian spiritual advisers who privately counsel and pray with the president and begins with this vignette:

As he flew aboard Air Force One to Chicago on his 49th birthday earlier this month, President Obama dialed three Christian pastors to pray with him.

On an airborne conference call, he kidded with the religious leaders about being abandoned by his wife and daughters, who were away on vacation and at camp. As he celebrated his birthday, he was in a reflective mood. He told them he wanted to pray about the year that had passed, what’s really important in life and the challenges ahead.

“That was simply something that he wanted to do at his initiative because it was important to him,” said Joel Hunter, an evangelical pastor who was on the call and who is part of a small circle of spiritual advisers who frequently talk to Obama by phone.

The prayer session, which was not publicized and which neither the White House nor the ministers sought to bring to light, reflects Obama’s decision to keep his public expressions of religious faith to a minimum. Hunter said the president often reaches out to pastors for private spiritual conversation.

Just two days earlier, another Washington Post story noted a poll showing a growing percentage of Americans (though still a minority) think President Obama is actually a secret Muslim. Conservatives were most likely to hold that opinion, facts be damned. Why has this distortion spread?

Perhaps it’s because supposedly responsible people say such irresponsibly misleading things — people like Franklin Graham, son of the famous evangelist Bill Graham. Here, for example, is part of what the younger Graham said Thursday on CNN:

“I think the president’s problem is that he was born a Muslim, his father was a Muslim. The seed of Islam is passed through the father like the seed of Judaism is passed through the mother. He was born a Muslim, his father gave him an Islamic name. Now it’s obvious that the president has renounced the prophet Mohammed and he has renounced Islam and he has accepted Jesus Christ. That’s what he says he has done, I cannot say that he hasn’t. So I just have to believe that the president is what he has said.”

Other people on the religious right are even more insulting in questioning President Obama’s explicitly professed faith. During the 2008 presidential campaign, for example, Texas Eagle Forum President Cathie Adams — who later became chair of the Texas Republican Party — viciously attacked then-candidate Obama’s faith:

“While many question Barak Hussein Obama’s ‘religion’ …, the more important question is whether he has a ‘relationship’ with Jesus Christ because that is the only HOPE that any of us have to obtain eternal life. I personally see NO evidence that Obama has that kind of ‘saving faith.’”